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This picture in the article is deceiving, [1] photo is planted as a photograph from a satellite but was taken from a helicopter [2] Quote:>>Wired took our team photo not in our beautiful offices, not in our mission control center, nor our manufacturing floor, but via a chartered helicopter, nonetheless.

The End of Violence is a 1997 film by the German director Wim Wenders.

[...] has a conversation with an intelligence agent who makes it clear that anyone who gets in the way of a new “anti-crime” satellite surveillance program not yet approved by congress will be dealt with.

"The disruptive threat that Skybox poses to the space-based commercial imaging market might also annoy some powerful people in the US government who could deny the company licenses, seize its technology or bandwidth, and place restrictions on the frequency and users of its service."

"If the wrong person gets pissed, they’ll shut us down in an instant"

Why build this in the US if making something better/faster/cheaper is such a hassle?

@Peter Smith - think about it, it's like hitting a baseball-sized object hundreds of miles up traveling thousands of miles an hour with enough power to burn a hole in it with a laser powerful enough still, after passing through the atmosphere.

Even after you did that, spy satellites are protected from that very attack by technology similar to that found in fighter pilot visors and the canopies to protect from atomic flash, and a little like welder's helmet visors that darken instantly to protect the eyes from arc flash.

The author starts by detailing what Interstate the truck is on, but misses the split between I-80 and I-90. It is I-80 that goes through the states named after Indiana. I-90 heads north through Minnesota, ending in Seattle.

It is interesting, but big on promises and low on explanations. I have only vaguely looked at the subject, though.

The further you go in orbit, the more ground to cover, the larger the hemisphere is to cross... my understanding of spy satellites is they have rocket fuel to move about, and therefore guidance systems and the like. Not exactly inexpensive.

If you want parking counts, just put together your own the ground security cameras which you already have facing all of these parking lots.

How many mini-sats without guidance systems and jets to move about are required for the kind of targeted surveillance they are talking about? Sounds like quite a few.

@ted
""If the wrong person gets pissed, they’ll shut us down in an instant"

Why build this in the US if making something better/faster/cheaper is such a hassle?"

Question people should be asking themselves in many areas of commerce. It would be like investing in Moscow after the October Revolution.

In its own weird way, this vision of the future is just as inspiring as sending men to the moon.--No it's not, not even close; horrible analogy.

Yes, Skybox is planning to put the equivalent of cheap cell phone cameras into space, to beam the pictures down via something that is more or less DirecTV, to use cheap eyeballs to count cars or soybeans or whatever someone will pay to count. But the data those cameras provide might save the Amazon basin or the global coffee market—the uses are thrillingly infinite and unpredictable.
--Old technology/protocols are interesting, not "thrilling" or "exciting". "Quakesat" was interesting, counting cars in a Walmart...count me out. More space junk that will eventually burn up and be gone, turn the cameras outward into space, that's exciting.

Even taken on its own merits, this bit
"But the data those cameras provide might save the Amazon basin or the global coffee market—the uses are thrillingly infinite and unpredictable."
is hoplessly (or wilfully) naive. Yes, they *might* be used for those things, but it's more likely they'll be scouring the Amazon looking for the last remaining stands of some rare hardwood tree to cut down and mill for timber. Or pulp for high-end paper.

advanced 3d printers 30-50 years from now which churn out tiny sats which launch themselves and maintain themselves while in space, updating their programming while in space and with each new launch, creating decentralized and centralized networks like street gangs, sometimes working sometimes warring vs. the other with the idea of improvement in battle and intel harvesting.

larger mother ships with whale mouthed capture for grabbing a random set of sat-bots and gathering intelligence on their combined activities in their current partition of space

i envision a design mirrored from under our seas, each creature with its own purpose, strengths and weaknesses

The reason the DoD controls some 80% of the commercial satellite imaging market is that almost nobody else is willing to pay real money for satellite imagery. It is unclear that Skybox will be able to change that.

Satellite imagery, and particularly satellite imagery from the sort of fairly modest satellites people are talking about here, isn't really all that good. There's a reason why just about every story extolling the virtues of satellite imagery, including the linked article, uses aerial photography as a visually appealing substitute, why Google Earth resorts to satellite images only when it absolutely has to.

Can you pull useful data out of images with one-meter pixel size? Sometimes, certainly. Is it easy? Usually not. Is it cost-effective for someone who doesn't have a literal license to print money? So far the answer seems to also be "usually not". And maybe Skybox will be able to change that, but anyone who tells me about the satellites is missing the point. Tell me about the algorithms that will pull signal from all that noise. Do the math, including the part with the dollar signs.

Otherwise, I'll spot you free satellites with unlimited one-meter imagery, and you'll go broke trying to make sense of it. And then I'll have to figure out how to deal with a bunch of abandoned satellites...

I was still suffering a splitting headache, caused by staring into a telescope for 16 hours a day, for six straight days, at a parking lot from a hotel room in Hartford when I returned to the corporate headquarters in Chicago. The parking lot employees were stealing, but basically trivial amounts. The loss didn't justify the total $7k spent on my trip. The real problem was that a parking garage across the street had undercut the lot's rates, and the lot was more than half empty. The precipitous drop in revenue had prompted my surveillance and then surprise audit. I finished my report with "It would be cheaper to buy commercial satellite photographs." It was 1995. And they took my advice and still use them.

(Actually, the night shift attendant was allowing his very drunk girlfriend to run the lot while he walked around the block smoking a joint. She was staggering into the street waving in traffic heading to the local night clubs. This exposed the company to extraordinary liability. I don't think we'd have caught that, unless we used infrared. His day job was at the IRS.)

Like many articles in Wired, its all hype. Satellite with a 500 mile orbit will 1) come down soon, 2) have far less resolution than KH series, certainly not track a FedEx truck real time or anything else. The satellite is in ORBIT, it can't follow some truck down the road!

@JimBo: A moderately small satellite in a 500-mile orbit will come down in a bit over a hundred years, so that's not a concern - at least not to Skybox and its customers. As I noted earlier, cleaning up when they're done will be an issue.

But you are dead on in the real-time tracking issue. In particular, a satellite in a 500-mile orbit will be in view of a particular ground target for perhaps ten minutes at a time, twice per day. It would take a hundred or so satellites to do real-time tracking, and then they wouldd have to decide which target you are going to track. With about twenty million square kilometers field of view, they aren't going to be taking one-meter real-time imagery of everything at once.

Is there a version of this plan anywhere where they have actually done the math?